Immigrants and Sex Work in 1920s Rio de Janeiro

IRSH 62 (2017), Special Issue, pp. 105–132 doi:10.1017/S0020859017000621© 2018 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Between Rio’s Red-Light District and the Leagueof Nations: Immigrants and Sex Work in 1920s

Rio de Janeiro

C R I S T I A N A S C H E T T I N I *

National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET),National University of San Martín – Institute of Advanced Social

Studies (UNSAM – IDAES), Avenida Roque Saenz Peña, 832, piso 6Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, 1035, Argentina

E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on sex work relations in the Mangue, one of Rio deJaneiro’s red light districts in the 1920s. It follows multiple simultaneous trajectoriesthat converge in Rio’s changing urban landscape: League of Nation’s investigators(some of them undercover), local Brazilian authorities, particularly the police, andFanny Galper, a former prostitute and madam. It argues that the spatial mobility ofthe persons involved in sex work is part of broader debates: On the one hand, theseexperiences of mobility are closely connected to the variegated attempts at surveil-lance of sex work that characterized Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s and the specificracialized organization of the women’s work as prostitutes. On the other hand, theactors analysed in this article also participated, in different ways, in the production ofmeanings in broader debates on the international circulation of policies intended toregulate and surveil prostitution. These encounters offer the opportunity to explore someof the intersections between this international circulation of policies, local socialdynamics of European immigration, and the racialized history of labor relations inBrazil.

In 1923, Franklin Galvão, chief of the Ninth Police District of Rio deJaneiro, which included the area known as the Mangue (the Marsh), one ofthe city’s two red-light districts, sent the city’s chief of police a “DescriptiveMap of the Prostitutes Who Live Beneath the Jurisdiction of the NinthDistrict”. The “map” was actually a detailed list that in ten typed pages,identified, street by street and house by house, the landladies and tenants (aswell as their nationalities) occupying the houses of prostitution that fellunder his oversight. All told, 674 women occupied an area that covered only

* I would like to thank Paulo Fontes and Alexandre Fortes for the invitation to join this enter-prise, as well as the participants of the two workshops dedicated to the discussion of previousversions of this article for their suggestions and comments. I am also grateful to Bryan Pitts, AmyChazkel, and David Mayer for their patience and their efforts to make this text readable inEnglish.

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nine streets, a significantly higher concentration than in the more elegantneighborhood of Lapa.1

More than a mere description of a neighborhood, Galvão’s list docu-mented the results of an evolving set of policies that redefined carioca urbanspace.2 These ten pages also offer insights into a consequence of the reor-ganization of prostitution during Rio de Janeiro since 1889, when the citybecame the capital of the newly established Brazilian Republic. Such reor-ganization above all involved a process of concentration, in at least twodifferent ways:3 First, there was the spatial concentration of the Mangue’shouses of prostitution, due in large measure to the unprecedented expan-sion of the police’s prerogative to surveil and supervise sex work in the earlyyears of the Republic, but also the consequence of an adaptation by the sexbusiness to shifting patterns of urban masculine sociability. Second, therewas a concentration of African-descended women listed as “tenants”, incontrast to the predominance of European women (particularly ones withJewish surnames) on the list of “landladies”. Among the seven women whoowned two or more houses, only one was Brazilian. There was alsoone Portuguese woman, while the others were variously identified as“Austrians”, “Poles”, and “Russians”. Lists like this one also had lessevident meanings: for instance, they were useful for sustaining broaderdebates about the traffic in women. For many social reformers and privateEuropean and US organizations, the presence of European women inhouses of prostitution in cities like Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro servedas evidence of “the traffic in white women”, a widely used notion at thattime based on the belief that the mobility of a certain groups of sex workerswas automatic proof of the forced nature of their labor.Due to these simultaneous connotations, the list can serve as a point of

departure from which to examine the connection between two broaderissues. First, the Mangue and its prostitutes seen from a labor history pointof view: what was their world of labor like in the 1920s? Second, how were

1. “Descriptive Map of the Prostitutes Who Live Beneath the Jurisdiction of the 9th District”,Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, GIFI (Grupo de Identificação de Fundos Interno), 6C–751A.For more on Lapa and the Mangue, see Sueann Caulfield, “The Birth of Mangue: Race, Nation,and the Politics of Prostitution in Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1942”, in Daniel Balderston and DonnaGuy (eds), Sex and Sexuality in Latin America (New York, 1997), pp. 86–100.2. Carioca is a noun and adjective that refers to residents of the city of Rio de Janeiro.3. See Cristiana Schettini, Que tenhas teu corpo. Uma história social da prostituição no Rio deJaneiro das primeiras décadas republicanas (Rio de Janeiro, 2006). Although it had also served ascapital during Brazil’s 1822–1889 Empire, after the establishment of a republic in 1889, elitessought to remake Rio as a modern capital modeled on a European ideal that would epitomize“order and progress”, the central slogan of the positivist current then dominant among Brazilianelites and which also emblazoned the republican national flag. The result was radical urban reformand the persecution of some popular, especially Portuguese and African-descended, culturalpractices. The creation of the Mangue in the 1910s should be seen in the context of this process.

106 Cristiana Schettini



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their lives affected by both national and transnational debates about pros-titution that were intensifying at the time through organizations like therecently created League of Nations Committee on the Traffic of Womenand Children? Formed by representatives of various countries and privateorganizations, in 1924 the Committee sent investigative agents to more than100 cities, with a plan to interview both officials and representatives of the“underworld” in order to discover the “truth” about the traffic in womensince World War I.4 A few months after the Mangue’s list was put together,Rio de Janeiro was one of the cities to receive such a visit from threeAmerican investigators, official and undercover, in the name of the Leagueof Nations. In 1927, the Committee released its final report, which becameknown as the first document about the traffic in women produced from anempirical, systematic study of intercontinental reach. In the followingdecades, the report would help form the foundation of an “abolitionist”paradigm that would come to dominate international discourse aboutprostitution, especially after the creation of the United Nations.This article uses the League’s investigators’ visit to Rio de Janeiro as an

entry way through which to examine the local social relations surroundingprostitution. It then contrasts their observations with the experiences ofFanny Galper, a well-to-do owner of several houses in the Mangue, cited inGalvão’s list. The case of Galper, a native of Russia, is of special interestbecause, contrary to other landladies and madams, it is possible to followher across time through a variety of sources. Some of the documents abouther reveal the police’s attempts to surveil and control the movement of menand women across international borders (through passports and entry andexit registries), others reveal local authorities’ attempts to control urbanspace and its construction (through tax records and municipal registries),while still others reveal Galper’s desire to register some of her own decisions(through contracts and deeds). Since some of these sources do not referdirectly to the world of prostitution, but rather to her own economic,commercial, family, and affective relations, they go beyond the documentsusually consulted when women’s lives in the sexual marketplace are studied.Her life thus sheds light on labor relations in the world of prostitution,immigrant trajectories, and strategies for accumulating wealth, all in thecontext of changes in the 1910s and 1920s that shaped the neighborhood ofcheap prostitution known as the Mangue.Like the neighboring capitals Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Rio de

Janeiro was a point of entry for large numbers of immigrants and sex

4. Jean Michel Chaumont, Le mythe de la traite des blanches. Enquête sur la fabrication d’unfléau (Paris, 2009); Paul Knepper, “The Investigation into the Traffic in Women by the League ofNations: Sociological Jurisprudence as an International Social Project”, Law andHistory Review,34:1 (2016), pp. 45–73; Magaly Rodriguez García, “The League of Nations and the MoralRecruitment of Women”, International Review of Social History, 57:1 (2012), pp. 97–128.

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workers and often served as a transit point between Europe and other SouthAmerican cities. Since the 1870s, both Montevideo and Buenos Airesadopted a regulationist policy towards prostitution, employing a set ofsanitary and municipal measures, which subjected prostitution to specialstate oversight. In contrast, Rio de Janeiro never adopted any kind of formalregulation. Instead, the 1890 Brazilian Penal Code followed a Germanictradition by criminalizing diverse ways of inducing someone into prosti-tution and mediating access to it, in a broader fashion than Argentina’s andUruguay’s penal codes.5 Rio’s legislation was closer to the abolitionist view,which criticized and denounced both the inefficacy and the double standardof regulation systems. By adopting a terminology from the British fightagainst the regulation of prostitution at home and its colonies, abolitionistsin different parts of the world were also more willing to broaden thecriminalization of pimping than to control prostitution itself.In Rio, abolitionist legislation mixed with intense police vigilance over

prostitution houses, resulting in an idiosyncratic practice that came to beknown, around the 1920s, as “police regulation”.6 While the use of “reg-ulation” signaled a degree of acceptance of prostitution in social life, it wasthe police who should be responsible for defining how and where prosti-tution was practiced in urban space. Police also played a central role inexpelling women and suspected pimps from the downtown area (and alsofrom the country, using the 1907 expulsion law). In the 1920s, prostitutionhouses would become concentrated in specific neighborhoods, like Lapaand the Mangue. Therefore, in Rio, medically-inspired educational andprophylactic initiatives directed at sex workers and their customers in orderto prevent sexually transmitted diseases coexisted with broad police pre-rogatives to surveil prostitutes and to repress pimps.7

Rio de Janeiro was also unique compared to the nearby South Americancapitals in the way the internationally used expression “traffic in whitewomen” acquired local meanings. This can be better understood in the lightof previous histories of Brazilian race and labor relations: For most of thenineteenth century, slavery had been the habitual way to organize laborrelations in Rio. Brazil was the last country on the continent to abolish it,only in 1888. In the last decades of that century, African-descended workersfound themselves living and working in close proximity with newEuropean immigrants, in a world shaped by the racialized logics of

5. For a comparative analysis of these cities see: Yvette Trochon, Las rutas de Eros. La trata deblancas en el Atlántico Sur. Argentina, Brasil y Uruguay (1880–1932) (Montevideo, 2006).6. Caulfield, “The Birth of Mangue”; Schettini,Que tenhas, pp. 29–88. Police inspector ArmandoPereira reinforced the idea of a peculiar police regulation within an abolitionist system in his 1967book Armando Pereira, Sexo e Prostituição (Rio de Janeiro, 1967), p. 90.7. Sergio Carrara, Tributo a Vênus. A luta contra a sífilis no Brasil, da passagem do século aos anos 40(Rio de Janeiro, 1996).




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seigneurial domination in Brazil.8 Thus, the vocabulary circulating in manyof the world’s cities, which used metaphors of racialized slavery to talkabout forced prostitution, would gain a specific weight in Brazil. Based onthese singular factors, this article argues that the Brazilian approach toregulating sex work was not the result of a misunderstanding of Europeantendencies, or of a “lack of a system”, as some socialist opponents of thepolicing practices claimed at the time.9 Rather, it was the product of a spe-cific interaction between the international circulation of policies intended toregulate prostitution, the local social dynamics of European immigration,and the racialized history of labor relations in Brazil.10

In keeping with recent trends in the historiography, this article treats thehistory of prostitution as labor history.11 Framing the analysis in this waydraws on two scholarly trends in Brazil that have examined women’s laborfrom a gendered perspective: First, the experiences of working-class urbanwomen, which have received much attention in scholarship that has exam-ined the social and cultural history of the First Republic (1889–1930). Thisliterature has focused on daily life, urban history, and “popular culture” andso does not fall squarely within what has traditionally been understood aslabor history. Yet, these studies have indeed allowed a rich and multi-layered understanding of how women in early twentieth-century Rio livedand how they worked. Many authors have examined, for example, thevarious ways in which they earned a living or made use of the legal system.They have also explored the gendered and moral meanings of urban space.12

8. Sidney Chalhoub employs the notion of a “seigneurial domination logics” to describe thehegemonic way of reproducing social subordination in nineteenth-century Brazilian society,further discussing its changes in the face of the emergence of new forms of racial science. SeeSidney Chalhoub, “What Are Noses For? Paternalism, Social Darwinism and Race Science inMachado de Assis”, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 10:2 (2001), pp. 172–191.9. For the socialist lawyer Evaristo de Moraes, Rio’s police could not be called regulationists,abolitionists, or hygienists, since, in his view, local police authorities simply did not have a system.Evaristo deMoraes,Reminiscências de um rábula criminalista. (Rio de Janeiro, 1989 [1922]), p. 84.10. Racialized notions, meanwhile, were central in the whole international debate about sex work,as can be clearly seen in the trajectory of the term “white slavery”: Gunther Peck, “White Slaveryand Whiteness: A Transnational View of the Sources of Working-Class Radicalism and Racism”,Labour: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 1:2 (2004), pp. 41–63. Peck traces howthis expression was feminized among North American and British workers during the nineteenthcentury, demonstrating the historical meanings of the connection between sex work and wagelabor in denunciations of labor exploitation.11. For entry points into this strand of research see Luise White, The Comforts of Home. Pros-titution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, IL, 1990); and Lex Heerma van Voss, “The Worst Class ofWorkers: Migration, Labour Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900”, inMarcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labour. Essays in Honor of JanLucassen (Leiden, 2012).12. Martha Abreu, Meninas perdidas. Os populares e o cotidiano do amor no Rio de Janeiro dabelle époque (Rio de Janeiro, 1989); Sueann Caulfield, In Defense of Honor. Sexual Morality,Modernity, and Nation in Early Twentieth Century Brazil (Durham, NC, 2000).




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Second, the social history of slavery, which has produced some of the mostexciting research in Brazilian labor history during the last decades, hasrecognized women’s centrality in organizing labor tasks and family ties, incultivating cultural ties between Africans and their descendants, and indeveloping strategies for accumulating property and gaining autonomy orfreedom.13 Together, both trends in the literature have repeatedly demon-strated that a gender perspective has much potential in terms of elucidatinglong-standing problems in social history, including the trajectories ofimmigrants, social mobility, and social networks.

UNDERCOVER IN RIO

The 1920s were a critical period for the emergence of a transnationalframework to think about and political deal with sex work. One keymoment in this was the establishment of League of Nations AdvisoryCommittee on the Traffic of Women and Children in 1921. Although mostmembers took an abolitionist stance and criticized measures that sought toregulate prostitution, the debates in the committee were intense, especiallyconcerning licensed bordellos.14 Its early years focused on keeping aneye on ports and employment agencies, persuading participating countriesto approve anti-trafficking legislation, and on becoming familiar withhow prostitution was regulated in various cities. The InternationalAnti-Trafficking Convention of 1921, in addition to recommending thecreation of the committee, also proposed substituting the expression“traffic in white slaves”, widespread in the previous decade, for“traffic in women and children”. Although the old label would continue tobe popular in the following decades, the shift in terminology signaledan intention to construct a problem of global dimensions, not simplyone of European women emigrating to other continents. It was in thiscontext that a representative of the United States proposed an unprece-dented “social research project”, which would include sending severalresearchers to examine the situation on the ground, with financial assistanceprovided by the Rockefeller fortune, via the American Bureau of SocialHygiene.15

13. Particularly important are Maria Odila Dias,Quotidiano e poder em São Paulo no século XIX(São Paulo, 1984); and Flavio Gomes et al., Mulheres negras no Brasil escravista e do pós-eman-cipacão (São Paulo, 2012).14. Jessica R. Pliley, “Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in theLeague of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936”, Journal ofWomen’s History, 22:4 (2010), pp. 90–113; Rodriguez García, “The League of Nations and theMoral Recruitment of Women”, p. 105; League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Expertson Traffic in Women and Children, 2 vols (Geneva, 1927), League of Nations Archive [hereafter,LNA], C.52.M.52.1927.IV, vol. 1, p. 8.15. Cf. League of Nations, Report, pp. 5–7.




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That this proposal came from an US representative was no coincidence:In New York, the first decades of the twentieth century had been a heydayfor local organizations promoting urban reform and social hygiene. JohnRockefeller Jr. had funded new techniques for researching organized crime,corruption in municipal government, gambling, and prostitution. In LowerManhattan, these private initiatives (which at the end of the nineteenthcentury had been dedicated to exposing ties between local authorities andorganized crime) had begun to employ new strategies: the use of secretagents to infiltrate the criminal underworld and obtain valuable informationfor doctors, private detectives, social workers, scientists, and puritanicalreformers.16 In the US, these investigative initiatives had been associated,from the beginning, with efforts to combat the municipal regulation ofprostitution. For many US reformers, “regulation” equaled “acceptance”,while combatting the traffic in women was a central step on the road toabolishing not only regulation, but also virtually all types of sex business.Although the members of the League of Nations Committee received the

idea of “social research” with enthusiasm, not all of them agreed with theNorth American researchers premises. In Geneva, the proponents of localregulation of prostitution continued to believe that prostitutes should live inlicensed bordellos, where they could be identified and subjected to periodicmedical examinations. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, a variety ofmeasures were taken for protecting “public morality” and “health”, all theseconverging in the creation of a separate legal status for prostitutes. In the citiesthat adopted this regulationist strategy, moral and hygienic arguments had thepractical effect of placing a broad group of women under permanent suspicionand special police and medical control. The abolitionists, on the other hand,opposed regulation by denouncing its sanitary inefficiency, since it failed toprevent the spread of syphilis; its injustice, since it sanctionedwhat they saw asa sexual and moral double standard; and its immorality, since it led the state totolerate, if not protect pimps (thus turning into a pimp itself), placingprostitutes at the mercy of unscrupulous exploiters.17 Consequently, manyabolitionists also urged the criminalization of a variety of intermediationactivities in relation to sex work. Thus, in settings like the Anti-TraffickingCommittee, the idea began to take hold that “abolition”was themost effectiveway to combat the exploitation of and traffic in women.18

16. Jennifer Fronc,New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chicago,IL, 2009), pp. 3–10;Maira Keire, For Business and Pleasure. Red Light Districts and the Regulationof Vice in the United States, 1890–1933 (Baltimore, MD, 2010), pp. 69–88.17. One of the paradigmatic cases was the scandal caused in the 1880s by the trafficking of youngBritish prostitutes to Belgian (regulated) brothels, which helped abolitionist propaganda. SeeChaumont, Le Mythe, pp. 24–27.18. Rodríguez Garcia, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women”, p. 105;Jessica Pliley, “Claims to Protection”, pp. 90–113.




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Drawing from these previous experiences, such as the North Americansocial reform initiatives, and, more indirectly, from the European debateson regulation and abolitionist positions, three American researchersembarked on a long journey in 1924 with the goal of discovering first-hand,beyond “rumours” and “sensational stories”, the “real facts of the situa-tion” concerning the global traffic in women.19 Significantly, the trip startedin South America; for the first leg, between May and July 1924, BascomJohnson, a major of the US Army, accompanied by Samuel Auerbachand Paul Kinsie (the undercover agent referred to as P.K. in the project’scorrespondence), visited Buenos Aires, Montevideo, the Argentine-Uruguayan border towns of Concordia and Salto, and finally arrived inRio de Janeiro. They began in Buenos Aires precisely because they expectedit would be an ideal place to demonstrate the harmful connection betweensystems of regulation and the traffic in women.20

In South America they faced a significant challenge. In contrast to theexperiences they had made when doing similar research in New York, thethree researchers were unable to communicate directly with locals, theywere not familiar with the urban geography, and they knew nothing of theeveryday contact between residents and the authorities. They had to takethe word of their private informants from the “underworld” and use thisinformation to evaluate and question information obtained through officialchannels.21 Upon their arrival in Rio, the difficulties became even greater:they had to understand a system that, as opposed to Buenos Aires, did notallow them to confirm their previous assumptions that the regulation ofprostitution was connected to sex trafficking. Even though Rio de Janeirodid not regulate prostitution (at least not in ways that, at the time, were seenas “regulation”, such as a specific legal status for sex work and public healthpolicies, for instance) it seemed to the researchers to be an important spot inthe trafficking routes.Paul Kinsie arrived at Rio ahead of the group in what was an exploratory

trip. There, he met with Boris Thomashevsky, a well-known actor in theYiddish theater scene of New York, who was in South America on tourwith his troupe. Like P.K., Thomashevsky had previously lived inManhattan’s Lower East Side. He had been active in theatrical productionswith social themes since the 1910s. While talking to P.K., Thomashevskyexpressed an interest in gathering information for an article on the

19. League of Nations, Report, p. 9.20. On this trip, see Cristiana Schettini, “Conexiones transnacionales. Agentes encubiertos ytráfico de mujeres en los años 1920”,NuevoMundoMundos Nuevos [Online],Débats, put on lineon 28 November 2014, available at: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/67440; last accessed 15October 2017.21. This can be seen throughout the reports. Chaumont analyses this operation in the productionof the Final Report by the Body of Experts: Chaumont, Le Mythe, pp. 88–102.



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participation of “people of his race” in South American prostitution.22 Thetwo of them made a few visits to houses of prostitution in Rio. Their con-versations with Jewish women revealed that they had chosen to come to Rioboth because they had friends whowere already there and in order to escapeEurope’s terrible post-war economic conditions.23

This first visit had a powerful impact on P.K., labeling what he saw as“truly beyond description”. He was particularly struck by the “segregateddistricts” with up to 10,000 prostitutes, who were “clad in loose-fittingchemises and short dresses, with arms and legs exposed”, as they stood atthe doors of rooms that offered little in the way of privacy or health.24 P.K.did not name the streets or the neighborhood, but it is likely that he wasdescribing the Mangue. What he saw as a sordid geography was home towomen whom he described as “some of the most depraved that can beimagined”, prepared to offer such “perverted” sexual practices as the“Brazilian fashion”, which P.K. explained was a local term for “sodomy”.Despite the massive presence of Brazilian women working in the area, thetwo observers had the impression that foreign women predominated.The foreigners stood out from the locals due to both age and color. TheBrazilians were “younger and the greater number [among them are]Portuguese negroes”, an expression that focused on the two outstandingfeatures of these women in P.K.’s perspective: their skin color and the lan-guage they spoke (most likely, they were looking at Afro-Brazilianwomen). They noted that in Rio there were neither obligatory medical

22. “Commercialized prostitution”, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 18–19 May 1924, LNA, Fonds duSecretariat [hereafter, FS], S 172. On Boris Thomashewsky, see Zachary Baker, “G’vald, Yidn,Buena Gente: Jevel Katz, Yiddish Bard of the Rio de la Plata”, in Joel Berkowitz and BarbaraHenry (eds), Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and ShowBusiness (Detroit, MI, 2012), pp. 202–224, 222. One of the few announcements of the Thoma-shewsky troupe in Rio shows that they stayed at least until September: “Companhia israelita deoperetas, dramas e comédias dirigidas pelo célebre ator sr. Boris Thomashewsky”, Jornal do Brasil,28 September 1924, p. 32.23. “Commercialized prostitution”, Rio de Janeiro, 18–19 May 1924, LNA, S 172. What followsin this section is based mostly on the field reports of the First Enquiry on Traffic in Women andChildren produced by the three researchers in their official and undercover investigations, par-ticularly the transcriptions of first-hand conversations and observations conducted by P.K. Thesame source also contains a collection of official and unofficial documents, letters and charts theygathered during their stay in Rio. Overall, this is the rawmaterial fromwhich the Body of Expertsproduced the Final Report published in 1927. Actual names were replaced by codes, which can bedeciphered with a Code Book in box S 171. For a careful critique of the making of the final report,see Chaumont, Le Mythe. For an analysis of this material in its ethnographic dimension, seeJean-Michel Chaumont, Magaly Rodriguez García, and Paul Servais, “Introduction”, in idem(eds), Trafficking in Women, 1924–1926. The Paul Kinsie Reports for the League of Nations, vol. I(Geneva, 2017), pp. 7–18. In the second volume, the authors have included a careful transcriptionof Paul Kinsie Reports and the Code Book.24. “Commercialized Prostitution”, Rio de Janeiro, 18–19 May, 1924, LNA, FS, S 172.




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exams for sex workers, nor any restrictions on the women’s movementthroughout the city.25

Two months later, in July 1924, Kinsie returned to Rio, this time accom-panied by Samuel Auerbach and Bascom Johnson, who devoted themselves tothe official aspects of the study. During this second visit, P.K. establishedcontact with the owner of an elegant house of prostitution in Lapa. Heintroduced himself as an envoy of his informant in Buenos Aires, who, heclaimed, was interested in expanding his investments in the carioca market.26

Sophie, anonymized as “7-M” in the report (“M” for madam), hoped toconvince him to buy her boarding house for women in Lapa. It was in this waythat she became one of P.K.’s most valuable informants; both talked in English,and in her attempts to close the sale she shared her understanding of thepeculiarities of prostitution in Rio. Like P.K.’s informants in Buenos Aires, shebelieved that the market had become saturated with European women hopingto save money and return to Europe. But unlike in Buenos Aires, she high-lighted the importance of avoiding any arrangement that might smack ofpimping, since under Brazilian law, with its abolitionist undertones, a variety ofways of facilitating, intermediating, or profiting from prostitution were crimes.This perspective was reiterated both by other madams and the men who

lived with them, identified by P.K. as “T” (for “traffickers”). They explainedto P.K. that, in Brazil, the “girls” were not allowed to have “managers”, butonly “suckers” (customers). It was thus necessary to take certain precautions.These men seemed to see themselves as associates of either the girls ormadams, and they hoped that their partners would someday have their ownhouses of prostitution.27 In the meantime, the “girl”would usually work in ahouse, while her “boy” looked for an “honest and legitimate job” to avoidpolice harassment or potential denunciations by previous and “vengeful”girlfriends. Although everyone involved expected social mobility, manythings could go wrong along the way, and many couples and agreementsended badly. Indeed, almost twenty years before the League of Nationsresearchers’ visit, many of the cases of expulsion of foreigners from Brazilrecounted tales of relationships of this sort that had ended due to violence,pregnancy, or disease.28 In Rio de Janeiro, unlike in Buenos Aires, 8-M,another anonymized madam, explained, with one quick complaint at a policestation, a girl could “finish him”. All the men and women with whom P.K.spoke during his July 1924 visit alerted him to the dangers of the policecampaigns to find and expel pimps.

25. “Traffic in Women and Children”, 11 July 1924, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, LNA, FS, S 172.26. Schettini, “Conexiones”.27. Rio de Janeiro, “Commercialized prostitution”, 25 July 1924, LNA, FS, S 172.28. For more details on South American sex work circuits through the lens of the expulsion offoreigners, see Cristiana Schettini, “Exploração, gênero e circuitos sul-americanos nos processosde expulsão de estrangeiros (1907–1920)”, Tempo, 33 (2012), pp. 51–73.




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Sophie and the other foreign madams of the more elegant Lapa boardinghouses explained to P.K. that their main task, in addition to maintaining thehouse, was to serve as an intermediary in the oldest sense, by finding menwilling to pay their girls’ bills. This was a good business, according toSophie, because for rich men in Rio de Janeiro, maintaining a young foreignwoman was a sign of prestige.29 When she spoke of her niece in Warsaw,who she hoped to introduce to a prosperous Brazilian merchant, Sophieexplained that she considered herself more matchmaker than job inter-mediary. Her goal was not so much for her niece to start working in a houseand to specialize in specific sexual services, but rather for her charms toattract the rich man in question and thus save her from the fate of a “beggar”in the streets of Warsaw.30

In their conversations with informants in both Rio de Janeiro and BuenosAires, many of the perceptions of the men and women of the “underworld”clashed with the Americans’ expectations about the work, commercial, andaffective relations of the sex workers. In both cities, pimps and madamsfound it awkward when P.K. asked them about strategies to recruit anddeceive victims, and were taken aback by his obsession with so-calledgreenies (the inexperienced young women who P.K. assumed would bringin the most profit).31 In both places, the informants emphasized that therewas a high turnover among the women, and, as P.K. observed in Rio, theyounger ones were more likely to be Brazilian. In contrast to the tacitpresumption by P.K., it seemed obvious to the informants that olderwomen, who were more experienced at the sexual techniques in demand ineach city, were always the best option for working in houses of prostitution.For his part, P.K. searched for anything that might look like a constraint onthe freedom of European women among all their complex strategies gearedto survival and mobility. Any trace of coercion, threat, or deception led himto characterize these relations as “slavery” – “white slavery”, we might say,although the researchers did not use this expression anymore. After all, theway they ignored the plight of young Brazilian women, some of whomwere children, who they saw in the houses they visited, indicated thatexploitation required a certain type of victim, one that excluded Braziliansand non-whites.32

29. See also Margareth Rago, Os Prazeres da Noite (São Paulo, 1990), pp. 167–200.30. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 17, July, 1924, LNA, FS, S 172.31. For instance: “You’re a mersugar (crazy)!”, exclaimed his main informer in Buenos Aires,1 – DH, when P.K. expressed his preference for a “green” woman. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 7–9June 1924, LNA, FS, S 171. See also Cristiana Schettini, “Conexiones”.32. P.K. found two Brazilian girls at “10-M”’s house in Lapa; she told him they were fifteen andsixteen years old. He noticed that “both girls are Brazilians and appear very young”. He refused tochoose one of them when the Madam offered. As he was leaving, a police officer entered, as a“friend of the house”, not finding anything wrong with the girls’ presence there. Rio de Janeiro,Brazil, 11 July 1924, LNA, FS, S 172. A few days later, P.K. dropped by many houses looking for




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The disconnect between the perspectives of researchers, madams, and“traffickers” illustrates different conceptions about what constitutedexploitation and “white slavery”. For the researchers (as well as for Brazilianlawmakers), deception, seduction, lack of autonomy, threats, and otherforms of coercion were all components of a relation equivalent to slavery.33

But for those who were directly involved in this business, what they did wasmore akin to “work placement”, matchmaking, and other types of inter-mediary activities that were common at the time both among immigrantsand in the domestic service sector, as well as in all sorts of commercial andartistic professions. This role was based on networks of friendship andkinship, both real and fictive, many founded upon common ethnic identities,which eased their departure from home and their arrival in a new countryand culture.Through these conversations, P.K. constructed a certain perspective on

how prostitution worked in Rio de Janeiro. His view was strongly influ-enced by the racism and classism expressed by the European madams, whoconsidered themselves far removed from the “window prostitutes” whofilled various corners of the city center, many of them Brazilians whom theycalled “half niggers”. As one of the “traffickers” explained, the Brazilianwomen were “dumb” and not suitable for men like them.34 Comments likethese show the ways in which the social organization of prostitution waspredicated upon a combination of racist, ethnic, and age-based criteria.

SEX WORK IN RIO : THE VIEW OF LOCAL AUTHORITIESAND PROFESS IONALS

The risk of police harassment for the men who lived with prostitutes andmadams was something raised not only by P.K.’s informants, but also by theBrazilian authorities in their meetings with the research team of the Leagueof Nations. They emphasized their compliance with the new internationalnorms, explaining to the foreign visitors that Rio de Janeiro had notadopted the much-criticized Buenos Aires model of officially regulatingprostitution. They proudly pointed to their laws governing the expulsion offoreigners, especially the more recent 1921 law that barred foreign prosti-tutes from entering the country and restricted the international movement

“girls of foreign birth, under 21 years”; all the underage girls he met seemed to be Brazilian. Rio deJaneiro, Brazil, 22–23 July, 1924, LNA, FS, S 172.33. Metaphors of slavery, beginning with the notion of “traffic”, appeared everywhere. On theirubiquity as well as the local meanings of such conceptions, see Schettini, Que tenhas, ch. 2.34. A madam explained to P.K. that men “who spend money” don’t want these “half-niggers”;they would prefer European girls. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 11 July 1924, LNA, FS, S 172. A fewdays later, a pimp told him that he considered Brazilian women “dumbs”, “not for us”. Rio deJaneiro, Brazil, 15 July 1924, LNA, FS, S 172.




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of both prostitutes and pimps, in accordance with the recommendations ofthe international convention from that very year.35

Still, the researchers had been trained to mistrust the authorities, and theysuspected that the law was both poorly enforced and easy to evade; after all,the sex trade seemed to be functioning quite well. Indeed, P.K. had wit-nessed first-hand the cordial relations between the owners of the boardinghouses in Lapa and the police, who ignored the presence of underageBrazilian girls and accepted bribes from the madams to protect their housesfrom troublesome clients.36

The researchers also spoke with other informants, such as “respectable”individuals and representatives of private groups like the lawyer Lourençode Mattos Borges, of the Brazilian Council of Social Hygiene.37 In an effortto explain Brazilian racial categories, Borges, who was more comfortablespeaking French than English, classified the prostitutes as blanches natives,blanches étrangères, mulâtres (café au lait), and noires. The last two cate-gories contained, in Borges’ estimation, almost half of Rio’s prostitutes.While the noires were predominantly to be found in the Mangue (ninety-one out of 143 in the whole city, according to his count), the mulâtres weredivided fairly equally between Lapa (139) and the Mangue (174). Thesestatistics were complemented with data provided by the American nurseBertie Rice, who worked in the Prophylactic Inspectorate for Leprosy andVenereal Diseases (Inspetoria de Profilaxia da Lepra e Doenças Venéreas),created in 1921.38 Through Rice, they gained access to the lists of houses inLapa and the Mangue put together by visiting nurses, who tried to convincethe women to get treated for sexually transmitted diseases.39

Consistent with the racially marked gaze of Lapa’s madams and of P.K.himself in his initial excursions with Thomashevsky, Rice explained that theMangue was a small neighborhood, made up of just seven streets betweenthe Mangue Canal and Salvador de Sá Avenue and packed with houses of“the worst type of prostitution” to be found in the city. The conditionswere cramped and unhealthy: two or three women shared one small room,with nothing better to do than stand “partly clothed” in their doorways,where they tried to attract the attention of passersby. They ate their few

35. The authorities’ claims and positions are set out in the transcription of official interviews withthe Committee researchers and in official questionnaires sent to all governments. The Final Reportreproduces the Reply by the Brazilian Government to the Questionnaire issued by the Secretariaton 6 August 1921, fromwhich researchers extracted the official position of BrazilianGovernment.League of Nations, Report, vol. 2, Appendix III, “Reply by the Brazilian Government”,pp.39–40.36. See note 34.37. “Respectable individuals” was a particular classification in the Code Book. See LNA,FS, S 171.38. On the Inspectorate, see Sergio Carrara, Tributo a Vênus, pp. 229–245.39. “Relatorio Mensal para el Distrito de las Prostitutas”, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, LNA, FS, S 172.




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meals of coffee and rolls in the area’s cheap restaurants. According to thevisiting nurses, of the 579 women who lived in those houses, theoverwhelming majority (396) were Brazilian, followed by seventy-four“Russians” and forty-five “Poles”. Of all the women, 174 were classified as“mulattos” and ninety-one as “blacks”. According to Rice, the localgovernment’s complete lack of interest in this small area left the police as theonly point of contact with the authorities and frequently gave way tofraternization with police officers who visited thewomen during their patrols.To complement the knowledge they gained from both official and under-

world informants, the researchers also had access to legal decisions andlegislative debates, which might have offered further insight into local con-ceptions of prostitution and exploitation. For instance, the 1915 legislativedebates – eventually resulting in revisions to the Penal Code that criminalizedthe “traffic in women” – clearly reveal that Brazilian parliamentarians wereinformed about debates taking place in France, Germany, and Italy about thedefinition of consent for adults, deception (both through informal promisesand work agencies), and ways of intermediating and profiting from prostitu-tion. Brazilian legislators were thus mindful of the international abolitionisttrends, which they used to intensify the criminalization of relationships thatinvolved prostitutes and their intermediaries. For them, the traffic in womenwas akin to slavery, “in which the poor victims completely lose their indivi-duality and become subject to the vilest exploitations”.40

As can be concluded from their reports, however, the League of Nationsresearchers were not very interested in the content of the cases thatprosecuted pimps or the details of expulsion cases against pimps. Actually,both the Brazilian authorities and researchers from the League of Nationspreferred to cite as their evidence the aggregate data from police stations andcourts. For the Brazilians, lists of expelled foreigners offered proof that theywere actually fighting human trafficking; for the researchers, lists of foreignprostitutes showed that victims of trafficking were living in the Braziliancapital. Since the way both groups conceived of prostitution was asif all were European women, it is easy to understand why the form ofrepression chosen was summary expulsion, carried out by the police, inaccordance with the 1907 law of expulsion of foreigners, combined withmore recent measures that sought to control who disembarked at the ports.The goal was to prevent foreign women from establishing a foothold tobegin with.The contrast between the documents produced by local authorities and

the observations of the researchers from the Anti-Trafficking Committee

40. See the documentation of the Brazilian legislative debates gathered by the League of NationsComittee research delegation in: “Câmara dos Deputados, Pareceres, 1908–1915”, Rio de Janeiro,Brazil, LNA, FS, S 172.




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offers a multifaceted view of the nature of sex work in Rio de Janeiro in theyears after World War I. Despite language barriers and cultural mis-understandings, P.K.’s direct contact with the houses of prostitution in“elegant” Lapa and “depraved” Mangue shows, if only in an indirect andfragmented way, how the madams, pimps, and even sex workers themselvesunderstood their experiences. It was more difficult for P.K. and his collea-gues to make sense of the actions of local authorities and the peculiar cariocasystem, which combined abolitionist legislation (not least through a crim-inalization of pimps) with semi-official toleration in zones like the Mangue.The researchers preferred to view the records and statistics they gathered asunequivocal proof that European prostitutes comprised a significant por-tion of the women working in Rio’s brothels and that the city was thus amajor destination in the international networks of trafficking.

THE LIFE OF FANNY GALPER IN RIO

Rio’s specific combination of abolitionism and regulation (the latter in arather repressive, police-mediated variant) formed the general frameworkfor the city’s world of prostitution and its sex workers. It is evident thatsuch a framework did not function as a significant obstacle for those whoacted as business people in the field, including the madams. At the sametime, state practices influenced both the social mobility and race relationswithin the world of prostitution. Fanny Galper’s life in Rio de Janeiro is acase in point. In Franklin Galvão’s 1923 list, she was one of the few womenwho owned more than one house, both located in Rua Pinto de Azevedo (atnumbers eighteen and twenty-three, see Figure 1). A Pole and a Brazilianlived in the first; two Russians and six Brazilians in the second.Fanny Galper owned still more houses; notary books contain records of

some of her economic and personal relations over a nearly fifteen-year period,between 1921 and the mid-1930s. In addition, in 1930, her ex-husband SollyDebrotiner was accused of being a pimp and subjected to expulsion pro-ceedings. Finally, entry and exit records from the United States reveal detailsof her life before she came to Brazil, which she deliberately omitted later on.Together, these documents form the pieces of a puzzle that hint at some of thestrategies of a Russian immigrant whose life revolved around prostitution.In 1930, when Fanny was fifty-two years old, an assistant police chief

accused a fellow Russian, Solly Debrotiner, of having taken advantage ofFanny’s “weakness” following an illness making her “fall into his clutches”and marry him. The marriage lasted only a few months, enough for him toextort a part of her fortune, under the pretense of investing it in businessventures. Called to testify, Fanny gave the police a most interesting narra-tive that partly went along with the authorities expectations, and partlypresented a remarkable account of her life. Through stereotyped expres-sions characteristic of police allegations, she accused her husband of having




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repeatedly asked her for money. When she got “tired” of this situation, shedecided to ask for a divorce. The main lines of this accusation were thecommon point of many deportation trials for pimping, which con-temporaries accused of expressing inquisitorial police procedures. As can beseen from registers of her financial procedures in those months (furtheranalysed below), her accusations were not the whole story.The other part of her testimony, in which she recreates her life as a

prostitute, is unique and revealing. She arrived in Rio in 1908 and beganworking as a prostitute on Rua São Jorge (see Figure 1).41 Since the end ofthe nineteenth century, this area had housed prostitutes who had been

Figure 1. Rio de Janeiro’s downtown area in the 1930s. From the last years of the nineteenthcentury up to the second decade of the twentieth century, prostitutes’ houses converged in thearea around Praça Tiradentes. They were part of an expansive nightlife area, together with itsmany theatres, restaurants, cafés-concert and pubs. São Jorge street is highlighted. Known forhosting “Polish” women at the turn of the twentieth century, it is believed to be the first placethat Fanny Galper established herself in Rio (circle 2). During the 1910s, police actions resultedin a spatial concentration into two neighborhoods: in Lapa (circle 3), elegant houses, known as“pensions des artistes”, whose residents were generally white, European women who identifiedthemselves with a French style of prostitution; on the other hand, in the small group of streetsaround the Canal de Mangue, on the other side of the Praca da República, the Mangueneighborhood was associated with Russian and Polish house owners and Brazilian women. Thepicture (circle 1) also highlights the Mangue streets where Fanny Galper had her houses.

41. Her testimony forms part of the file on Solly Debrotiner’s expulsion case: “Auto de declar-ações de Fanny Galper”, 28 December 1929, in “Expulsão de Solly Debrotiner”, ArquivoNacional (Rio de Janeiro) [hereafter, AN], Fundo: Série Interior. Extrangeiros. Expulsão, IJJ7 –

148, 1930.




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expelled from the houses located along busy tram lines, where they wouldpost themselves in the ground floor windows. This highly visible “windowprostitution”was antithetical to the authorities’ efforts to “morally cleanse”the city center, and many of the prostitutes expelled by police wound up onRua São Jorge. These included both Brazilians and foreigners, particularlywomen from the Azores. According to an official report from 1912, onlyfour years after Fanny’s arrival, forty-one houses of prostitution existed onRua de São Jorge at the time.42 The majority were home to only one to threetenants, most of whom were European women like Fanny: Persons iden-tified as “Poles”, “Russians”, “Germans”, or “Austrians” made up morethan half; there were also eight Italians, six Brazilians, and one Portuguesewoman. The street had long been known not only as a “stronghold ofprostitution”, but also as a place where sex was inexpensive, and the womenwho worked there, Brazilian and European, white and black, felt the forceof police efforts to control both the location and nature of their activities.43

Fanny Galper testified that she had moved away when “the police closedthe houses in that [other] zone”. She was most likely referring to theperiodic expulsions that happened during the 1910s, which forced manyprostitutes to relocate to the Mangue, further still from the city center. In1916, a journalist interpreted this new displacement as a symptom of thepolice’s lack of an effective plan, not as a conscious strategy to concentrateprostitution in a specific area: With this new wave of expulsions, the womenbegan to “invade streets previously inhabited only by families”, particularlyin the area known as Cidade Nova, where the Mangue was located.44 In thisprocess, Fanny Galper moved to Rua Pinto de Azevedo, one of the areasthat would become known for “Poles”, a generic designation for cheapprostitutes from Eastern Europe. Although Fanny attributed her move topolice measures, once established in the area, her life began to changeradically. By 1930, she owned four buildings, whose rooms she rented orsub-rented to prostitutes, who paid 10 mil-réis per day.45 All told, Fannyhad four or five tenants per house.

42. The report was compiled by the police commissioner in response to an enquiry by the Dutchdiplomatic mission about the measures taken by the Brazilian government to combat the traffic inwhite women. “Ofício do chefe de polícia ao subsecretário das Relações Exteriores”, 3 January1913, Arquivo Histórico do Itamaraty (Rio de Janeiro), Ministérios e Repartições Federais, Maço303–3–6. The diplomatic query, in turn, is a graphic illustration of the degree to which the idea of“white slavery” had become an issue of international politics at the time.43. The expression is from the socialst lawyer Evaristo de Moraes, in his Ensaios de PatologiaSocial (Rio de Janeiro, 1921), pp. 282–283. On Evaristo deMoraes, see Joseli Nunes deMendonca,Evaristo de Moraes. Tribuno da República (Campinas, 2007). Also see the contribution by AldrinA. S. Castellucci and Benito Bisso Schmidt in this Special Issue.44. “O decoro da cidade. Ostentação cínica do vício”, A Noite, 21 January 1916, p.1.45. Until the beginning of the 1940s, Brazil’s currency was based on the real (plural: réis), its basicdenomination being mil reís (one thousand réis; written as 1$000). One thousand mil réis was




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Fanny’s situation and prosperity constitute a striking contrast to theimage of a sordid and miserable Mangue that the League of Nationsresearchers had described. This image, on the one hand, was one of theresults of a reorganization of the sex trade attempted to segregate thecheapest prostitutes; on the other hand, it also resulted from the researcher’sinformants who, being from Lapa, had looked down on theMangue. At anyrate, in the deportation case against Fanny’s ex-husband, police were notinterested in how she had become a madam or in explaining how sheassembled so much property, but rather in presenting her as a victim, a(white) “slave”. Perhaps because of the pressures of the interrogation, sheabruptly stopped telling her life story and switched to a tale typical ofdeportation cases (a switch that comes across as sensible in the document):“About eleven months ago, she met Solly Debrotiner in her home. […] Hehad no profession whatsoever.” She was sick, and he proposed marriage.Soon after, he began to ask for money, to launch business ventures thatfailed, until, “tired of satisfying her husband’s demands”, she applied for anamicable legal separation.46 Satisfying the then prevailing needs of a policeinvestigation for the expulsion of foreigners, Fanny’s case entered the annalsof the “traffic in white women”. Despite this apparent conformity, Fanny’stestimony at the same time manifests how different her case was fromwhat the League of Nations researchers considered as typical: Far from ayoung, recently arrived European, she was an experienced and prosperouswoman. For police authorities, though, her age and illness had made hervulnerable to the shady interests of a man who the commissioner in chargeof the case called a “rabbi of a society of Israelites, composed exclusivelyof prostitutes and pimps, charged with inspecting the bookkeepingfor brothels”.47

When Solly Debrotiner was in jail, and the authorities had already issued adecision for deportation, a request for habeas corpus to halt his expulsionreached the Supreme Court.48 In addition to accusing the police of manip-ulating the accusations, the defense explained that Debrotiner and Galper’s

called one conto de réis, written as 1:000$000. She leased one of her houses for 800$000 a month. Ifshe had four tenants in another house, she would make around 1:200$000 a month. In 1930, theaverage monthly rent of a residential home (for a family of seven) was around 500$000. Therefore,she made almost the double of a regular rent. “Custo de vida na cidade do Rio de Janeiro.Orcamento mensal de uma familia segundo o ‘Economical Data About Brasil, 1912–1930’”,Jornal do Commercio. Retrospecto commercial (Rio de Janeiro, 1931), pp. 1–263, 153.46. “Auto de declarações de Fanny Galper”, 28 December 1929.47. See the testimony of a police officer: “Auto de declarações de Eduardo Boselli”, in “Expulsãode Solly”.48. A brief cronology would be: The police investigation started on 28 December 1929; he was injail from 3 January 1930; the expulsion decree was issued on 22 January 1930; the habeas corpusrequest reached the Supreme Court on 24 January 1930; and he was finally released on 23 Feb-ruary 1930. “Expulsão de Solly”.




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separation had been friendly, seeking to prove that he was not a pimp, butrather a prosperous businessman and leather manufacturer.49 Curiously, thedefense did not mention his activity as a rabbi, although he had officiated awedding at the “Beneficent and Recreational Society of the Sons of Israel”,whose membership included the “most distinguished elements of the Israelitecolony”.50 Thus, at least until his brief marriage to Fanny attracted theauthorities’ attention, Solly Debrotiner appears to have been seen as arespected businessman, both within and outside of the Jewish community.At this point in Fanny’s story, two questions still await an answer. First,

how did she transform herself into a successful landlady in the Mangue,after starting out as a “Polish” and therefore rather marginal prostitute onRua São Jorge? And second, why, as a successful landlady, did she marry aman who apparently was only after her money? The only way to answerthese questions is to track her doings through other types of sources, inwhich she appears as neither prostitute, nor madam, and that shed light on apart of her life that she never revealed publicly. Particularly useful are thenotary books of Rio de Janeiro, in which private individuals could recordcertain transaction and deeds. Fanny Galper made ample use of thisinstrument of legal certification having debts, purchases, leases of property,and even a will registered. Through these, it is possible to understand morefully some of her relations and decisions as well as fill some of the gaps inher life. Fanny Galper appears to have acquired her first property in theMangue in 1921, when she purchased a building at 65 Rua Nery Pinheirovia a public auction of the estate of a Brazilian or Portuguese woman. Twoyears later, she bought her second property, at 250 Rua São Leopoldo, froman Italian couple.51 Fanny’s acquisition of these two properties shows howthe expansion of the sex trade in the Mangue was closely tied to thedynamics of the real estate market, illustrating how the character of pre-mises in the area changed from “residential” to being used in sex business.The researchers from the League of Nations and other contemporaries

searched at length for evidence of organized crime rings run by traffickersand pimps of Jewish origin. But the transactions that Fanny recorded overfifteen years depended on other people, particularly on a Portuguese mannamed Antônio Alves Dias Pereira. He signed, in her stead, all the trans-actions that she registered, since she always declared that she did not knowhow to read or write. She also leased to him the building on São Leopoldo

49. “SupremoTribunal Federal –Habeas corpus”, 24 January 1930, “Expulsão de Solly”. Also seethe mentions of his business activities in “À praça”, Correio da Manhã, 22 June 1924, p. 9.50. “Vários cultos – judaísmo”, Gazeta de Notícias, 5 January 1927, p. 5.51. Livro de Notas, Alves, Maria Luisa Ferreira (outorgante), Galper, Fanny (outorgada), AN, 5oOficio de Notas do Rio de Janeiro, Livro 281, fs. 11v, 30 April 1921; Livro de Notas, “Venda”,Lattari, Francisco (outorgante), Galper, Fanny (outorgada), AN, 10° Oficio de Notas do Rio deJaneiro, Livro 148, fs. 59, 15 March 1923.




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Street between 1924 and 1931. Finally, the two of them formed a con-sortium to construct dwellings on Rua Rodrigues dos Santos. The con-secutive numbering of the addresses (twenty-two to twenty-six) indicatesthat these were probably small houses or even single rooms to be rented toprostitutes.52

In addition to having been Fanny’s business partner throughout the1920s, Antônio also had an affective role in her life. In her 1925 will, shenamed him her sole heir, calling him “a person who holds her esteem andconsideration, with whom the testator lived in a marital relationship sincenearly two years, and from whom she has received much affection anddemonstrations of consideration and esteem”.53 Antônio’s presence, in botheconomic and affective terms, was in keeping with practices common in Riode Janeiro since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when the housesof prostitution were still located in the city center: Older foreign women,some of them ex-prostitutes, became commercial and romantic partners ofPortuguese or Brazilian men, with whom they opened or took over estab-lishments combining bar and brothel. As we have seen, this was also anexpectation of the young “traffickers” with whom P.K. spoke, who hopedthat their “girls” might eventually become madams, thus ensuring a morepeaceful life for both. Rio de Janeiro’s legal strategy of targeting pimpsplaced these (as well as other persons who related to prostitutes) in thepolice’s crosshairs. It is in this light that we might make sense of bothFanny’s relationship with Antônio and her marriage to Solly. To understandwhy only the latter was prosecuted as a pimp, it may be relevant to considerthat Antônio was a Portuguese merchant, far removed from the stereotypeof the Jewish pimp, while Solly seemed to smoothly fit this image.In contrast to both the expectations of the League of Nations researchers

and the police about the “vile exploitation” of and the traffic in women,Fanny Galper’s reasons for associating with both men were far more com-plex. One additional factor here was the debt that she incurred withAntônio to build the houses on Rua Rodrigues dos Santos in 1926. Theyborrowed 110 contos de réis from a Lapa merchant, a significant debt thatwould demand sacrifices from both. Two years later, construction wascomplete, and they divided the houses between them in accordance with theinvestment each had made. When the debt was due, they were only able tomake a partial payment and obtain an extension on the remainder. In 1930,the loan repayment was demanded under the extended terms. At that point,

52. Livro de Notas, “Arrendamento”, Galper, Fanny (outorgante), Pereira, Antonio Alves Dias(outorgado), AN, 10°Oficio deNotas do Rio de Janeiro, Livro 163, fs. 46, 12May 1924; Livros deNotas, “Dissolução de condomínio”, Pereira, Antonio Dias da Silva (outorgante), Galper, Fanny(outorgada), AN, 16° Oficio de Notas do Rio de Janeiro, Livro 122, fs. 2V, 25 May 1928.53. Livro de Notas, “Testamento”, Galper, Fanny, AN, 10° Oficio de Notas do Rio de Janeiro,Livro 183, fs. 40, 19 August 1925.




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Fanny listed herself as Solly Debrotiner’s wife, although they had alreadybegun the process of obtaining an amicable legal separation. Not only didFanny not make any reference to their separation vis-à-vis the merchant,she used their marriage, which was legally designated as including jointownership of their possessions, to amortize the debt, which was reduced tothirty contos de réis. The next year she finally paid off the debt. Fanny’sshort marriage to Debrotiner thus might make more sense when we realizethat it helped her reduce the debt she had incurred with Antônio.Yet, there is another, even more surprising aspect of Fanny’s life that is

revealed through the records of her prior stops in the United States: In theUS, Fanny Galper, at least since 1904, had been Fanny Debrotiner, wife toreal estate agent Solly Debrotiner and mother to William Debrotiner. In1912, Solly obtained permanent US residency, and in 1916 he moved to Riode Janeiro, where he intended to dedicate himself to the leather business.54

Meanwhile, Fanny, who had, according to her later testimony, arrivedalready in 1908, built her own life in Rio using her maiden name, first asprostitute, then as a landlady in the Mangue.So, Fanny left the US as Fanny Debrotiner, wife of Solly and mother of

William, and, according to US documentation, a literate resident of Peabody,Massachusetts, and disembarked as Fanny Galper, an illiterate Russianprostitute on Rua São Jorge. During her long relationship with Antônio inthe 1920s, she always presented herself as a Russian and a widow. Not evenin her will did she mention her son, although she wanted to leave somemoney to siblings back in Russia. Thus, both Fanny and Solly seem to haveshared a preoccupationwith keeping the twoworlds, one associatedwith theUS and the other with Brazil, separate, omittingmention of the former in thedocuments generated in the latter.The evidence from Fanny Galper’s actions and economic movements

constitutes a context for the deportation trial against Solly Debrotiner in1930. Although these documents do not offer a plausible explanation formany of her actions (why she remarried him, why she accused him) or aconclusive indication of the nature of her relationship with Antônio, theydo help to see the “old, vulnerable” Fanny and the “evil pimp” Solly in adifferent light. Both of them handled substantial sums of money duringtheir years in Brazil. Both of them agreed not to mention their previousfamily life and their son, whatever their conflicts were. Therefore, theremight be a possibility that what the police in its 1930 investigation saw asSolly extorting the vulnerable Fanny could equally be interpreted as way

54. This information is gathered from “United States Passport Applications, 1795–1925”, data-base with images, FamilySearch, available at: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QKDF-CZMS; last accessed 15 October 2017; “United States Census, 1910”, database with images,FamilySearch, available at: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M2JN-LM3; last accessed 15October 2017.



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https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903�/�1:1:M2JN-LM3


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Figure 2. Pictures from passport applications submitted by the Debrotiner family. In October1916, 47-year-old Solly Debrotiner (bottom right) applied for a passport to travel to Rio deJaneiro. He declared the purpose of his travel as starting a “leather business for himself”. Fiveyears later (29 September 1921), 42-year-old Fanny (top) and her son, 24-year-old William(bottom left), also applied for US passports to go to Rio de Janeiro. Both declared that the purposeof their travel was to join their father and husband Solly Debrotiner. Identified as a “housewife”,Fanny signed her own application and countersigned that of her son, William. All three declaredthat they were from Russia, and submitted proof that Solly Debrotiner had been naturalized in1912. Solly’s 1916 passport picture was reprinted in a carioca newspaper during his deportationtrial in early 1930. The report suggested that he was a victim of police persecution.Solly’s passport picture is reproduced in: “United States Passport Applications, 1795–1925”, databasewith images, FamilySearch, available at: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-99X7-CGNL?cc=2185145&wc=3XZ8-PTP%3A1056306501%2C1056640201; last accessed 15 October2017. See also “A polícia e sua campanha contra os exploradores de lenocínio. Solly Debrotinerestará sendo vítima de perseguicão?”, Diário da Noite, 11 January 1930, p. 3. Fanny and William’sapplication are in: “United States Passport Applications, 1795–1925”, database with images,FamilySearch, available at: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QKDF-CZMS; last accessed 15October 2017.




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for both to put their accounts in order at the end of their lives, thus for-malizing a separation that dated from years earlier. In other words, FannyGalper’s actions during the brief time she was remarried to Solly Debrotinersuggest that this second marriage was, to a certain degree, economicallyconvenient for her, at least inasmuch as it allowed her to amortize the debtshe shared with Antônio – something that never came up in the trial. Thishypothesis also offers plausible reasons for her to remarry for such a brieftime. She thus may have acted on the grounds of previous agreements withSolly. In fact, after her second marriage to Debrotiner, Fanny continued tobe in close contact with the Portuguese Antônio, with whom she invested ina bar in 1930.55 Even if this was not the case, and there is no way to decipherthe reasons and circumstances of many of her actions, the FannyGalper thatemerges from these fragmented references appears an attentive woman,prepared to take advantage of the few opportunities she had in order tobuild a life of wealth in Mangue, in the midst of police eviction orders andunequal partnerships conditions, among other constraints.It is difficult to keep track of Fanny’s subsequent activities. She had put

money aside in 1925 for the Israelite Beneficent Funeral and ReligiousAssociation, an organization that congregated Jewish prostitutes, to buryher in InhaúmaCemetery.56Her participation in this Association hadmultipledimensions: first, the importance of her religious identity, especially when shethought she was going to die soon. Secondly, as historian Beatriz Kushnir hasshown, religious associations were a fundamental way of maintaining con-nections of mutual aid in the world of sex work in order to deal with themultiple challenges individuals were facing, as women, as Jewish persons,as immigrants, and as prostitutes or madams. Although there were similarassociations in many cities where there was a strong presence of JewishEuropean immigrants in the sex trade during the first half of the twentiethcentury, Kushnir remarks that Rio’s association formany years was composedexclusively of women.57 In this sense, Fanny Galper’s life was hardly unique.There are indications that there is a grave in New York of a person named

Fanny Debrotiner who passed away in 1942. Whether this is the burial placeof the Fanny who prospered as a madam in Rio de Janeiro is still to beconclusively established – like so many other aspects of her remarkable life.58

55. The registration of their new partnership in the Board of Trade on 30 June 1930 is referred in“Junta Comercial”, Diário de Noticias, 4 July 1930, p.5.56. Livro de Notas, “Testamento”, Galper, Fanny , AN, 10o Oficio de Notas do Rio de Janeiro,Livro 183, fs. 40, 19 August 1925.57. On the Israelite Beneficent Funeral and Religious Association, see Beatriz Kushnir, Baile demáscaras. Mulheres judias e prostituição (Rio de Janeiro, 1996), pp. 27–48; 95–160.58. The burial place is cited as: “Fanny Debrotiner, 1942; Burial, Springfield Gardens, Queens,New York, Montefiore Cemetery”, retrieved from “Find A Grave”, available at: https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=148970695; last accessed 15 October 2017.



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EXPLOITATIVE RELATIONS IN RIO ’S WORLDOF SEX WORK

The League of Nations researchers were correct to stress the importancethey placed on listening to the voices of the men and women whom theyidentified with the “underworld”, in order to achieve some understandingof the relations in and around prostitution in each place they visited.Despite their cultural perspectives, language restrictions, and abolitionistconvictions, they established a dialogue that forced them to adapt their ideasabout sex trafficking to the evidence they found. The eventual adoption ofa broader and more malleable conception of trafficking demonstrates someof the difficulties they and Brazilian authorities encountered in drawingclearly marked lines between acceptable and unacceptable migrations.59

The journeys and choices of Fanny Galper/Debrotiner as well as therelationship and agreements she entered allow us to see just how hard thiswas. Although the accusation against her ex-husband Solly Debrotinerportrayed Fanny as Solly’s “slave”, other records allow us to see her as awife and mother, as a madam and real estate entrepreneur in partnershipwith Antônio, and as a Jewish immigrant concerned with guaranteeing aburial in accordance with the rites of her faith. In light of Fanny’s multipleidentities over the course of her life as an immigrant, we can observe how,like many similar women in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, her economicand personal relations overlapped.Fanny’s prosperity was partly built upon her ability to associate with and

dissociate herself from different men at different points in her life. Also, hertrajectory reflects a sense of opportunity in acquiring real estate property atprecisely the moment when police were pushing for a reorganization ofurban space and the creation a concentrated and segregated zones for sextrade and sex work. Similar trajectories of other European women, parti-cularly “Russians” and “Poles”, such as those associated in the IsraeliteBeneficent Funeral and Religious Association, together with the wide-spread expectations among Jewish men and women who P.K. met as anundercover investigator, converge to suggest how widespread such storiesof upward mobility were among the sex workers during those years. Thisdoes not mean that actual opportunities for such upward mobility wereabundant, rather it was the expectations and hopes connected to such storiesthat counted. To follow Fanny Galper’s steps thus not only sheds light onher personal abilities and the particular circumstances of her life; it equallyreveals the broad historical constraints and contexts in which such abiography became possible and in which her actions acquire meaning. Thesecontexts involve the impact of the carioca way of dealing with paid sex workin the 1920s – in which regulation, abolition, and police repression were

59. Chaumont, Le Mythe, 2009, pp.87–90.




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combined in a peculiar fashion, giving way to a specific social organization ofprostitution. Under these circumstances, Fanny’s dependence on differentkinds of men (from her lovers to, very probably, police officers) and the risk ofhaving to hand over her money to themwere constant. In this sense, questionsabout exploitation, gender relations, family organization, friendship and loveintertwine in her history.Another crucial context for understanding Fanny’s life is the racial

dimension of this specific social organization of prostitution and its impacton the unequal production and distribution of wealth. Fanny Galper builther prosperity upon the exploitation of her tenants. By concentrating cheapprostitution in the Mangue, the police rendered these women vulnerable,nearly invisible, and potentially highly dependent on better positionedintermediaries such as Fanny. In other words, Fanny’s prosperity was, to ahigh degree, the result of very unequal labor arrangements that she estab-lished with young prostitutes, who were mainly Brazilians and mostlyblack. All national and foreign observers from the 1920s agreed in recog-nizing the difficult conditions in which these young women lived, as theypaid up to ten mil-réis per day to women like Fanny, ate precariously inplaces like the bar that she owned with Antônio, and had to confront theattempts by Bertie Rice and others to urge them to come for a stay in thenew venereal disease dispensary. This appears to have been a direct effect ofthe spatial and social organization of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro in the1920s, which could be defined as concentration-cum-marginalization:enhanced opportunities to accumulate wealth for white women, based onthe sexual labor of black women, in conditions marked, if not ensured bypolice control. All these dimensions of the world of prostitution and itslabor relations remained unacknowledged in the abolitionist thrust amongthe League of Nations observers and the Brazilian authorities.While it is possible to trace at least some of the moments in the lives of

individuals such as Fanny Galper, it is much more difficult to know furtherdetails about those mostly Afro-Brazilian women who worked for her. In afew exceptional cases, however, their tragic fate allows us to catch aglimpse of their lives. Such was the case of Brazilian Hercília Maria Luz (seeFigure 3): Her name appears on the list compiled by Franklin Galvão’s in1923 as one of Fanny’s tenants. Since 1926, Hercília had been living in ahouse on Rua Rodrigues dos Santos, which Fanny and Antônio had justbuilt together.60 She may have been one of those very young Brazilian girlswho P.K. observed fraternizing with soldiers and sailors during his excur-sions to the Mangue. Women like her were described as part of a degradedmilieu that only worsened the condition of the European women livingthere, the potential “white slaves”, but their own work conditions and lives

60. “Matou a tiros a mulher que o repelia”, O Jornal, 27 September 1927, p. 5.




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were never an object of interest. In 1927, her lover, a young soldier, mur-dered her, according to a newspaper.61 The paper noted that she looked noolder than twenty and was originally from Bahia, while her murderer wastwenty-four, pardo (of “mixed” ethno-racial descent), and from thenortheastern state of Pernambuco. Upon her return from a dance (“byautomobile”, as the newspaper noted), she found the soldier waiting for herat the door of the house with his revolver. His motive, according to thenewspaper, was that he felt “rejected”.In addition to her tragic death, we know that, for at least four years, she

paid Fanny and thus contributed to her prosperity. Such a relationshipnormally also included letting her “landlady” know about her comings andgoings, possibly also the night she went to a dance and was killed after-wards. It is possible to imagine, then, how police measures to segregateprostitution facilitated the dependence of women like Hercília on womenlike Fanny. In spite of the fact that the sexual specializations associated withAfrican-descended women were more highly valued and thus commandedhigher rates, it was white women like Fanny who had more access to wealthand the skills and networks necessary for negotiations with the police,and who could even garner some kind of protection if they managed to beconsidered (white) “slaves”.In the end, the carioca “system” was not the result of the distortion or

misreading of debates that occurred elsewhere, but rather of a confluence offactors. To trace some of them shows the limitations of an approach thatsees “local” and “international” settings as neatly separate. Rather, it seemsmore pertinent to follow the traces of human trajectories in the midst of an“international traffic in prostitution policy” in order to describe what tookplace in Rio.62 In this way, “productive misunderstandings” between dis-similar actors can be properly highlighted, such as those produced in 1924between the North American League of Nations researchers, local autho-rities, private organizations, madams, pimps, and prostitutes. They were“productive” in the sense that, from these encounters, the contested out-lines of the very idea of “traffic in women” emerged. In the meantime, theterms under which these encounters took place were deeply connected tothe partly unintended results of the city’s peculiar system of policesurveillance of prostitution and the sex workers – a policy that, despite its“abolitionist” overtones, had a peculiarly “regulationist” effect giving way

61. “Matou a tiros”; “Matara a tiros a mulher que o repelira”,O Jornal, 28 September 1927, p. 11.The photos are from “Uma cena de sangue na rua Rodrigo [sic] dos Santos”, Gazeta de Notícias,27 September 1927, p. 4, and “A cena de sangue da rua Rodrigo [sic] dos Santos”, Gazeta deNotícias, 28 September 1927, p. 4.62. The notion of “international traffic in prostitution policy” is from Laura Briggs,ReproducingEmpire. Race, sex, science and U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA, [etc.] 2002),pp. 21–45.




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to a situation of repressive tolerance. All that became sharply visible in themore marginal red-light district of the Mangue, where the poverty andprecariousness seen by P.K., Thomashevsky, Rice, and other contemporaryobservers, contrasted with the fact that the area was a source of wealth andprosperity for people such as Fanny Galper. Just as a Brazilian journalistobserved in 1930, the Mangue’s sordidness tended to obscure that it offeredmore possibilities for striking it rich than elegant Lapa.63 But these neweconomic opportunities for some white women cannot be fully graspedwithout understanding the context of prostitutes’ displacements in theurban landscape and across wider spaces. In this way, a focus onwork relations is also a way to address the spatial mobility of the persons

Figure 3. Pictures of Hercília Maria Luz, Fanny Galper’s tenant at least since 1923, and of JoséRibeiro do Nascimento, her lover and murderer, in 1927, in his Army uniform. Both picturesare from the police column of Gazeta de Notícias, one of the most important carioca’s dailynewspapers. They could have been one of the many couples formed by Brazilian military menand Brazilian young prostitutes that P.K. and other contemporary observers found in thestreets, in windows, and in the doorways of the Mangue’s brothels in the 1920s.Hercília’s picture is from: “Uma cena de sangue na rua Rodrigo [sic] dos Santos”, Gazeta deNotícias, 27 September 1927, p. 4. José’s picture is from: “A cena de sangue da rua Rodrigo [sic]dos Santos”, Gazeta de Notícias, 28 September 1927, p. 4.

63. Ricardo Pinto, Tráfico das brancas. Observações em torno dos cáftens franceses que vivem noRio de Janeiro (s.l., 1930), pp. 43–47.




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involved –within an urban area, within the country, yet also across nationalborders. These experiences of mobility were all bundled in the Mangueand the lives of those working there. At the same time, they are closelyconnected to the variegated attempts at surveillance of sex work thatcharacterized Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s, and which had multiple effects onthe organization of the women’s work relations in prostitution.

Translation: Bryan Pitts




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Immigrants and Sex Work in 1920s Rio de Janeiro

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Transcript of Immigrants and Sex Work in 1920s Rio de Janeiro